Even though the pandemic has disrupted so many commemorative events, you can still mark Maine’s bicentennial before the year ends, albeit in a more solitary way, by reading Tom Huntington’s wonderful new book, “Maine at 200: An Anecdotal History Celebrating Two Centuries of Statehood,” which showcases people and events from the first 200 years of Maine’s history.

An Augusta native now living in Pennsylvania, Huntington describes a variety of scenes from each of the 20 decades since Maine became a state, creating a mosaic of well-known stories along with some decidedly offbeat ones.  Huntington declares in the introduction that he is not trying to write a comprehensive history text; instead, he seeks to create an illuminating portrait of Maine’s two centuries by covering each decade in one of the book’s 20 chapters.

There are certain themes that weave throughout “Maine at 200,” one of which is leadership. Rather that repeating the oft-told story of Joshua Chamberlain at Little Round Top during the Civil War battle of Gettysburg, Huntington opts to describe Chamberlain’s role in resolving a political crisis in Maine during the 1870s. It resulted from a “disputed state election” that “threatened to flare into civil war,” and Chamberlain later wrote that his stewardship at this perilous time in Maine was “by far the most important public service” he ever performed

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith’s leadership in standing up to demagogue Sen. Joseph McCarthy, when the rest of the U.S. Senate was paralyzed with fear, is another example of Maine leadership. Her “Declaration of Conscience” speech, – in which she said, “people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents” – helped turn the tide against McCarthyism in the late 1950s.

Ten-year-old Samantha Smith from Manchester achieved worldwide fame in the late 1980s when she wrote to then Soviet premier Yuri Andropov challenging him to “please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war” with the United States. Her letter was reprinted in Pravda, the Soviet state newspaper, and she was invited by Andropov to visit the (then) Soviet Union where she spent time with Soviet youths at a summer camp by the Black Sea, visited Moscow and met with Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Following her trip to the Soviet Union, Samantha traveled widely as an ambassador for peace, eventually appearing on prime-time television, until her life was tragically cut short in August 1985, when her Bar Harbor Airlines flight missed the runway in Auburn and crashed.

Another theme in the book is how messy politics and elections can be – as if we need to be reminded. For instance, some of the votes by Maine residents to split from Massachusetts in 1820 featured attempts to “fudge the voting results,” by, among other things, the hiring of a Harvard mathematician to perform some “creative math” with the numbers. Politics in the 1830s were characterized as “a snake pit” in which some disputes were resolved by duels. There were attempts to disqualify votes in the 1870s, and in the 1880s, campaigns were “chock full of scandal and innuendo.”

A third theme is Maine’s connection with technology. Huntington describes how in the 1960s, Andover became home to an AT&T “earth station,” used to communicate with the Telstar 1 satellite, and how in 2019, Caribou native Jessica Meir rocketed to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spaceship as part of a multinational mission launched from Kazakhstan. Among many other accomplishments during the mission, Meir took part in the first ever two-woman spacewalk. A century earlier, Sangerville native and prolific inventor Hiram Maxwell invented the machine gun, which forever changed the nature of warfare and immediately led to untold carnage in World War I.

Aside from these themes, “Maine at 200” is packed with a wide variety of stories from Maine’s history. For example, in 1944, a German submarine cruised silently into Frenchman’s Bay near Bar Harbor and sent two spies ashore in a rubber dingy. Although the two secret agents were ultimately apprehended, the story of their landing on the rocky shoreline in a snowstorm and happening upon a taxi driver who was randomly in the area at that time – and how they ultimately ended up in New York – is a fascinating, if lesser-known, facet of Maine history.

In the chapter on the 2000s, Huntington recounts the harrowing flight of Somali refugees from their war-torn homeland to their new home in Lewiston. Upon arrival they were met with a sometimes-unwelcoming reception and were the victims of vile racist taunts by some “native” Lewistonians whose ancestors from Canada, ironically, endured similar xenophobia upon arriving in Lewiston in the 1870s. Over time, the Somali community has helped renew Lewiston, and while some tensions remain, they are abating, and the city’s trajectory is positive.

“Maine at 200” is an accessible and engaging celebration of Maine’s bicentennial. It is hard to imagine what Maine’s next 100, let alone 200, years will bring, but it is a sure bet that the year 2020 will figure prominently.

Dave Canarie is an attorney from South Portland and faculty member at USM.

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